GST Council likely to allow amendments to GSTR3B

The Goods and Services Tax Council is set to discuss a slew of law changes it is looking to introduce, CNBC-TV18 reported. This would include amendments to GSTR3B -- the monthly GST return to be filed by taxpayers -- among others.

The GST Council will reportedly ease compliance bottlenecks for e-commerce suppliers by allowing them to register under the composition scheme, a move that is expected to ease registration and also reduce tax outgo.

The Council is also likely to allow the usage of the government-run National Informatics Centre (NIC) as another platform to register e-invoices. The Government is planning to launch six invoice registration portals in the next six months to provide adequate backend IT infrastructure to handle the e-invoice load.

Further, the GST Council may empower both the Centre and the states to issue show-cause notices despite whether the taxpayer falls in their jurisdiction or not. This measure is expected to plug any leakage.

The GST Council is set to meet on June 28-29 in Srinagar, Kashmir. The meeting comes days ahead of the five-year anniversary of the launch of the indirect tax regime. The GST was launched on July 1, 2017, after a decades-long delay.

Since the introduction of the consumption-based tax, the GST Council has cut rates on several items, which has lowered the revenue-neutral rate, or the rate at which income to the states and the Centre isn’t eroded in absence of all local taxes, to 11.5 percent from the so-called revenue-neutral rate of 15 percent.

After nosediving in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, India’s monthly GST collections have remained above Rs 1 lakh crore for 11 months in a row, raising hopes that the tax system is settling down with compliance improving.